[nanis]

> [The Queen] granted her charter to their corporation named Governor and Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies.[15] For a period of fifteen years, the charter awarded the company a monopoly[26] on English trade with all countries east of the Cape of Good Hope and west of the Straits of Magellan.[27] Any traders there without a licence from the company were liable to forfeiture of their ships and cargo (half of which would go to the Crown and half to the company), as well as imprisonment at the "royal pleasure".[28]

Government granted monopoly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company

[Jensson]

The government didn't tell them to kill or enslave people, they did that on their own since that was more profitable than not doing it. The government then stepped in and forced them to stop killing and enslaving, which made the world a better place, today we don't have many companies that kill or enslave thanks to governments.

[lazide]

Do you want someone to add up the gov’t direct death tolls so we can compare?

Just off the top of my head; holodomir, the Great Leap Forward, the holocaust, the Khmer Rouge are at least 10x the East India companies death toll. We should probably add in war casualties too - at a minimum WW1 and WW2. I think I could list off probably 10 more with about 5 more minutes of work.

People can be terrible. More direct power usually means more terrible.

Gov’ts usually have the most direct power.

East India company was an odd case because they were granted defacto delegated gov’t power over a region that was full of ‘others’.

Considering the factors involved, it’s amazing they weren’t worse. Like the French Congo [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Congo].

[astrange]

Slavery isn't profitable, people do it for emotional or ideological reasons, or because they're not competent enough to run a business that has to actually trade.

This is literally why economics is called "the dismal science". Slaveowners called economists that when the economists told them to stop doing slavery.

[jncfhnb]

Monopoly is the natural state. Government is the only reason we have any alternatives.

[Gormo]

No, it is very much the other way around. Government is itself a monopoly, and has historically been justified by the intention to mitigate the "war of all against all" that emerges from chaotic competition between divergent factions in a raw state of nature.

But the modern status quo is so massively skewed toward government that the benefits from mitigating the worst cases of competition are vastly eclipsed by the detriments of monopolistic centralization.

[Jensson]

Modern governments are a democratic monopoly. Corporations aren't democratic, if a corporation gets powerful enough to overthrow the government and replace them you will be in much worse hands than if the current democratic government could remain in power.

So we shouldn't cheer on private corporations that developers technology that could allow them to replace the government, that is really really scary if they actually succeeds in doing it.

[Gormo]

> Modern governments are a democratic monopoly.

The fact that governments used contrived symbolic rituals to get arbitrary subsets of arbitrary aggregations of people to express nominal approval of their behavior does nothing whatsoever to alter either the empirical nature or the ethical implicatoins of its monopoly.

> Corporations aren't democratic

Good -- this means that it's harder for them to appeal to vague symbolism to convince people that their actions are inherently legitimate, which in turn means that they are under greater scrutiny to justify their actions, each on its own merits.

> if a corporation gets powerful enough to overthrow the government and replace them you will be in much worse hands than if the current democratic government could remain in power.

Large vested interests are already extremely adept at co-opting nominally "democratic" government and using the very monopoly you're trying to justify as a way of obtaining top-down power that they'd never be able to acquire on their own -- they have zero interest in overthrowing anything.

Regulatory capture is the principal mechanism of corruption in the modern world, and it's astonishing to me that people keep arguing for expanding the reach of the regulatory state in order to reduce the dominance of large corporations, when the actual effect is always to amplify it.

[_heimdall]

Monopoly is the byproduct of allowing centralized power, not the natural state. I'm not actually sure how we could narrow down the natural state of humans at this point, but I strongly suspect it wouldn't be based on an assumption that people are willing to give up a growing list of individual freedoms in the name of fear.

[jncfhnb]

Stopping the accumulation of power requires aggressive sacrifice from the less powerful.

This isn’t a feature of humans, but basic system dynamics / economics / etc.

A group gets more power and leverage that power to gain more power. Inevitable. Coordinated action is the only way to prevent it. And coordinated action is government.

[_heimdall]

It sounds like you're describing coordinated action as both the cause of and solution to the same problem.

Stopping this accumulation of power takes very little, its undoing the accumulation of power that is costly.

[jncfhnb]

Stopping accumulation of power is very hard when you have no accumulated power. I’m not sure how you could possibly believe otherwise unless you’re one of those believers in magical harmonious anarchy

[_heimdall]

When there isn't accumulated power you only have to avoid giving up power and sovereignty. There's nothing else to stop.

I don't consider myself an anarchist, partly be cause the term has been repurposed so many times now that it doesn't have a clear meaning.

The belief in magical harmony is unrealistic regardless of the model that's supposed to create it, whether its anarchism or federalism.